As an entrepreneur who spent years solving payment challenges for major financial players, Flutterwave CEO Olugbenga “GB” Agboola recognized a fundamental piece missing across Africa—a unified infrastructure to move money seamlessly between the continent’s 54 nations.

“I worked for a bank with the largest footprint in Africa, yet we couldn’t easily help customers expand their businesses into new countries,” Agboola recalls.  “There were so many regulatory barriers, technology gaps, and operational inflexibilities creating intense friction.”

The CEO points to examples like corporate clients needing help paying employee salaries quickly in another market, despite banks’ presence in both countries.  Cumbersome processes meant routing transfers internationally, resulting in delays of days or weeks just for basic transactions.

“It was crazy that sending money from Lagos to Ghana would take longer than just getting on a plane with cash,” Agboola says.  “These kinds of inefficiencies constrained economic growth opportunities across borders.”

By 2016, the fintech visionary decided to take matters into his own hands by co-founding Flutterwave.  He aimed to build an integrated payment platform that could interoperate across Africa’s diverse banking systems, mobile money services, and other localized payment methods.

“There was a need for a third-party player to sit in the middle of all these banks and payment providers to create simplified, low-cost transfers just by taking a small margin,” states the CEO.  “We wanted to become that trusted integrator unifying the whole ecosystem.”

Flutterwave’s strategy focused first on understanding and plugging into each nation’s distinct financial environment through partnerships with incumbents like banks and telcos.  This localization approach built critical adoption by providing locally relevant payment methods people already felt comfortable using.

“If mobile money is popular in one country, we integrate and make that available on our platform,” Agboola explains.  “If another region uses bank transfers more, we enable that local method while linking it to other payment types across borders for real-time settlements.”

By meeting consumers where they currently transact while unifying those fragmented pipes behind the scenes, Flutterwave rapidly scaled affordable payment solutions across Africa for businesses of all sizes.  This unlocked new economic opportunities, like allowing small merchants to sell goods seamlessly and instantly receive payments from buyers in other countries.

Fintech’s tailored offerings and cross-border capabilities have also opened pathways for innovative financial services models to reach underserved groups through partnerships with crowdfunding platforms, microfinance providers, and more.

“We may not directly tackle an issue like poverty reduction,” says the CEO.  “But our infrastructure creates on-ramps to enable all those businesses and lending models driving real economic empowerment and value creation.”

As Flutterwave’s platform and services ecosystem has expanded from domestic payments to international transfers, e-commerce, lending, and beyond, Agboola has had to carefully navigate the dizzying array of regulations and policies across Africa’s markets.

“If you want to operate across the continent’s countries, that’s 50 different regulatory regimes and registration processes to work through methodically,” he explains.  “We intentionally listen closely to financial authorities in every market about their specific rules and policy goals.”

Now valued at over $3 billion, Flutterwave continues rapidly iterating under Agboola’s leadership, rolling out more locally tailored payment products, services, and partnerships that remove cross-border friction for African entrepreneurs and businesses to thrive in the digital economy.

“So many of Africa’s unicorn startups and innovative models are solving fundamental challenges that were barriers to creating economic value at scale,” the CEO states.  “Our role is building that unified payment backbone to fuel that entrepreneurial spirit driving so much of the continent’s future potential.”